This unorganized lump of speculation is more or less a dump of my brain’s activity after I read Bruce Sterling’s talk, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” which he gave at Transmediale 10, Berlin, Feb. 6, 2010.
A few quotes:
Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, [...]
Saturday, December 26, 2009
“I am one of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Some quotes from Cormac McCarthy, in this interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Mr McCarthy says:
Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t [...]
Damien G. Walter wrote this call-out post asking for suggestions of currently working writers who are bold, who experiment, and who risk themselves. Somebody help him out; I want to know too.
I’ve been thinking about risk in literature lately—mostly in the context of wanting not to retread smooth ground—but I run into the same wall [...]
Monday, November 16, 2009
the tortoise in the wheelchair wrapped his forehead in a bandage
with a cast they made from plaster for his phony broken leg
so he’d get pushed around the sidewalk by the zookeeper’s assistant
with the hummingbird observing from behind the yellow flower
and he flapped his tiny wings they moved so fast you couldn’t see them
with resentment for [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
So this post by Damien G. Walter, writer extraordinaire and Clarion 2008 graduate, has jump-started all kinds of humming speculation in my brain about What I Want From Bookstores. And I want many things from them.
I don’t simply want books in a general sense, I want books that will change me, that I will love, [...]
Thursday, November 12, 2009
“I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties; that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.”
- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov
Saturday, October 17, 2009
tiger the color of light, brown deer
on the outskirts of night, girl glimpsed
leaning over green balconies of rain,
adolescent incalculable face,
I’ve forgotten your name, Melusina,
Laura, Isabel, Persephone, Mary,
your face is all the faces and none,
you are all the hours and none…
— Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol
(I found this snippet while searching through past story notes and [...]
I must shave my beard.
The beard is [not] a lady-killer.
The beard is the facial pelt that brings social isolation.
I will deface my beard.
I will permit it to pass over the sink and through the drain.
And when it has gone past I will turn my chin to see if I missed any.
When the beard has [...]